


She Used To Be Mine

by Thebiwife



Series: Song Prompts [3]
Category: The Good Wife (TV), Waitress - Bareilles/Nelson
Genre: Bullying, Catholic School, First Time, Gen, Song: She Used To Be Mine (Sara Bareilles)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28012320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thebiwife/pseuds/Thebiwife
Summary: The second of my attempts at a Kalinda origin story, this time inspired by the song 'She Used To Be Mine' from the musical 'Waitress'
Series: Song Prompts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044654
Kudos: 5





	1. Kalinda

“Do you remember when Blake called me  _ Leela _ ?”

Alicia nodded.

I stood up.

“What is it? Kalinda?” she watched me as I walked across the room to my bathroom. She knew me well enough to know she should let me leave the room, but spoke again so I knew she was there. I looked into the mirror, dark eyes smudged with eyeliner. 

“Stay there,” I called back. As I went to one of my hiding places, this one nobody knew about, not Cary, not Will, not Blake, not Nick, I didn’t want Alicia to know either. I removed the cover of the extractor fan and took the package out of the hole hidden behind the plastic blades. The plastic wallet, the one album of photos I’d kept from my childhood enveloped inside, didn’t seem so grandiose or in need of hiding at first glance. 

As I went back to the kitchen, Alicia perched on the sole kitchen stool. I peeled the album out of its greasy polythene sleeve and prised open the small 6 by 4” plastic pages. Inside the first one I showed her the name sticker that had once been glitter-glued on the cover.  _ Leela _ .

In the first photo I was a baby, small, dainty; in each that followed I was girly and bright, dressing in many colours of salwar kameez whenever I escaped the bounds of my school uniform. There were pictures of me running around green spaces with my brothers and cousins, at Diwali dressed in our best saris and suits.

“I grew up in Harrow, north-west London,” I said as I showed her a picture of me with my family and others at Temple. A quarter of my school had looked like me; brown skin, dark eyes, dark hair. There was a picture of me, still in primary school, maybe ten or eleven, at sports day, with three childhood friends, arms wrapped around each other smiling with plastic medals draped on ribbon around our necks.

“This is the place that changed me,” I showed her the same group of friends three or so years later, in our plaid skirts and cardigans at the Catholic girls’ school, our Indian ancestry worn as subtle stud earrings and nose rings, jewels we were asked by the Sisters to remove before PE. “It took far more than I gave them.”

Although it's true I had kept up the pretence at home. It's not easy to know at what moment I realised I was no longer the delicate flower my mother used to call me. “I still, just about, remember that girl.”

“What do you mean, Kalinda?”

“By thirteen, I wasn’t anything like I used to be. I had _serious_ anger management issues.” 

The anger and aggression I internalised changed me. Imperfect as I was, I tried to keep up a pretence, reciting the school motto in assembly, like she never doubted she was  _ Confident in God's love for us we commit ourselves to His service. _ What I said in words did not match my deeds, getting into deep shit around and after school. “At school, with the older girls, I began to get noticed.” The next photo was one my mother had spanked me for when she’d found it years later. I was sitting with three girls, on a fence near the back of school, cigarette in one hand, a small bottle of vodka in the other, school skirt a good three inches shorter than was allowed. “The girls who rebelled, often taller, older, stronger than me, began to lead me astray, and in my adoration for them, I blindly followed.” 


	2. Alicia

The thirteen year old Kalinda had described; drinking, smoking, short-skirt, was a far cry from the cute south-asian darling in the first few photos. She was far closer to the person leaning against the counter showing me the photos.

Kalinda turned the page.

“I was good, getting the grades my family expected so they were no wiser,” 

I turned the page, the next picture showed her getting an award for her English Literature class. Another of her from a production of  _ Romeo and Juliet _ . The next her with her exam certificates. 

“They entered me for my Maths and Science exams when I was thirteen, two years early. ...But instead of getting me ahead, it just gave me too much time to kill, with the older girls who had been the source of bad influence.”

“I lied to my parents about who I spent time with. When I was supposed to be studying Sindhi after school at Temple I would be getting into fights.” 

Alicia recognised the feelings that teenage Leela was exhibiting, from having her own teenage daughter and having lived it herself. She was being hard on herself; holding herself to the impossible standards that her older  _ white _ ‘friends’ held over her. The next photo showed her in central London, maybe Camden town, wearing something not dissimilar to what Kalinda wears when she meets Alicia in the bar for drinks on an evening. They were in a pack, a gang of girls, in matching denim, with far too many hair clips and enough lipgloss to de-stock a CVS.

“So there I was, forever trying to meet these  _ western  _ standards of beauty, while beating up the same girls for looking at me funny, for making fun of my size, for saying I was betraying my race, my religion, my culture. Internalised homophobia meant I didn’t know which way to act, whether to make love or war.” 

Any mother would recognise the look on her face in the next photo; she was broken.

“Wasn’t there anyone you could’ve asked for help?”

“I should have confided in a teacher I trusted, getting the help and guidance I badly needed, but it’s easier to look back now and identify who that could have been. Back then, all I was thinking was _ is it normal to feel like this? Why do I hate these girls so much that I was to slap them, kick them but then kiss them? _ ”

The next photo was of  _ Leela _ and a girl about a foot taller than her, a pale, freckled, auburn-haired beauty. They held hands, fingers interlaced.  _ Leela’s  _ lipstick is messy, her hair down in a way Kalinda has never worn it. 

“This is Katherine. She was my first everything. Kiss, fumble, lover, girlfriend. Yet at school she would call me names and hit me. I would fight back. And then we’d run away together on a weekend, get the train into London, go to Parliament Hill or Hampstead Heath, and she'd be this kind, loving, gentle person, we’d make love by the lake, in the trees, under bridges. It was everything, intense, powerful, wonderful, dangerous. My becoming and my undoing.”

“You were  _ fourteen _ , Kalinda?” 

She nodded.

Grace’s age.


	3. Kalinda

I could tell Alicia’s motherly instinct took over from her friendly concern, so I tried to veer the story back on track.

“As I had gotten so... _close_ to Katherine I alienated myself from everyone else, my family, my friends from Temple, the other girls my age at school, the older girls who knew what we were up to and wanted nothing to do with me afterwards. They would call me names, _dyke_ and _lesbo_. They feared her too, but when Katherine left school at sixteen I was left behind, lonely most of the time, with a reputation for beating up girls and kissing them. I learnt how to toughen up.” 

“I’m pretty certain you were already tough, Kalinda.”

“I still saw her outside of school but she grew up and moved on. Not long after that, I got mixed up with some guys I’d met down the canal in Camden. Was picked up by the police for possession of cannabis and was still completely baked when my parents met me at home. And then they sent me to boarding school. In Canada.”

“As a punishment?”

I shrugged. “It's not what I asked for. Being queer in any way shape of form in a Sindhi family was never going to wash over well, so sending you to another country with only your ultra-conservative pakistani uncle as a guardian was what they thought I deserved.”

“I mean Kalinda, you made mistakes. But you were a _teenager_.” 

“Sometimes life, sin, sexuality, just slips in through a back door, carves out a person and makes you believe it's all true.”

“It’s not a sin to love women, Kalinda.”

“I know that now. And I can be true to myself, I do like women. But it didn’t stop fifteen year-old me at Catholic Boarding School in Montréal from thinking it was.” 

“So that’s where you met Nick? What happened with him?”

“He was British, so I guess that made us have something in common for that reason more than anything else. He was two years older than me, once again. We dated, which was hard in Catholic school, but I got the impression that a few of the staff knew my story and thought it was better I ended up with him than running away with another girl. He adored me, and I tried to fall for him, which worked when I was still young and naïve and when I _wanted_ to change. I learnt to tolerate sleeping with men, I mean, I can even enjoy it sometimes.”

Alicia smiled sympathetically. “So you finished school in Montréal?”

She shook her head. “My Uncle wanted nothing to do with me after the first year so I had to quit school, with nobody to sponsor my Visa and pay my fees. Nick asked me to marry him, we left school together to move to Toronto.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

Two years older than Grace.

“That was legal?”

“The provincial court approved it with permission from my parents back home. I think they were just relieved I was with a man, and signed my life away.” 

“So you never finished school?”

Kalinda smiled and shook her head. “The irony that my family fled from Pakistan on the partition of India, my parents were always scared of what they read in the newspaper, that the Taliban or some other extremist sect would deny me and my female cousins the education they believed we were entitled to or something. Who knew that in the conservative West I still could have the same thing taken away from me.”


	4. Alicia

I saw a look in Kalinda’s eyes I’d never seen before. A look of love, not sexual or romantic love, but love for a person, for me, for sitting and listening to her tell me this. This harrowing story that only got worse as she continued. 

“Over the next few years I was regularly beaten and...abused by Nick. There was no point being in a marriage of convenience with a man who can't love, especially one who can’t even stop himself from beating me, who...pimped me out to his friends. He kept everything I made for him, so I started soliciting my own clients saved up the cash they gave me. And that’s when I left him.”

“I eventually managed to get as far as Mississauga, but knew he wouldn’t be too far behind, so I met a guy who trafficked...girls like me. Prostitutes. He got me to Detroit. From there I brokered a deal giving evidence against a trafficker who operated in Michigan to get rehoused in Chicago. And then I did the worst thing out of all of this.” 

“You slept with Peter.”

She nodded. 

I could tell from the look she gave me that she thought I would want to kill her, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I wanted to hug her and never let go. 


End file.
